On December 1, at 20:00, the broadcast of the play “Heart of a Dog” by the Odessa Academic Ukrainian Music and Drama Theatre named after V. Vasylko will start worldwide. The broadcast takes place within the framework of the final of the all-Ukrainian festival-award GRA.

This year, due to quarantine restrictions, it is being held online. The well-known work in world society touches on the most critical topics that are relevant at all times for different peoples and carries a philosophy of life.

You can watch this and other 11 competitive performances online on the Facebook page of the award itself and the partner Ukraine in Deutschland. Each performance is broadcast only once, in Ukrainian with English subtitles. The first screening took place on November 20th.

The performance from Odessa will be shown on December 1st. In the nomination “For the best dramatic performance”. The director of “Heart of a Dog” is the main director of the theater Maxim Golenko, the text of the novel was adapted to the stage by the playwright Lena Lyagushonkova.

According to the authors, the works of Mikhail Bulgakov are now extremely relevant. More than nine decades have passed since he wrote the text of the story, which formed the basis of the dramatization, but society, not having learned the lessons of history, is again on the same rake.

At the performance, in addition to the well-known metaphors and allegories, there are reminiscences to other works of Mikhail Bulgakov (“Fatal Eggs” and “Morphine”), and transparent allusions to our present. Quotes that have long since become aphorisms are given a new meaning. Indeed, the well-known correspondence between Engels and Kautsky in the 1920s, which Shvonder advised Sharikov to read in his story, was not mastered by many of his contemporaries, so the director and author of the stage play appeal to recognizable modern realities – the correspondence of today’s politicians.

“Dog’s Heart” was read a lot, and the movies were watched even more. According to the director Maxim Golenko, it is all the more responsible for creating a play:

There is a double difficulty because there must be a complete and non-contradictory solution to each episode, because the viewer will come to the theater, already knowing for himself what the play should look like.

Maxim Golenko

Undoubtedly, the spectator will understand and appreciate the director’s techniques of open and noticeable political satire in the play, which is skillfully veiled in Bulgakov’s multifaceted texts. Evil and sometimes ruthlessly the director talks about the relationship between society and government, including appealing to the present. He ridicules and exposes the “new” traditions, habits, principles and manners of Schwonder and the members of the Budkom, who turn from modern bureaucrats into NKVD members. And their attempts to “create” a proletarian from a Dog/subhuman will turn against Schwonder himself. And Sharikov, having superficially studied the “mat part”, will learn only the lessons of violence, and, having gained power, he will become a murderer.